When children are born and start growing, parent thinks of taking admission for their child in a good school for a quality education. But they forget that before giving responsibility of their child to a teacher, they should remember that parents are the first teachers of the child. This is so because, when the child goes to school for the first time he/she doesn’t know that how to mingle with a new school-mates. That’s why a parent should play a vital role of first teacher.

A parent need to organize pre-academic and curricular activities for the kid, when they decide to send a child to school it’s better to start with “Pre-Writing Activities” for their child from 3 years onwards. Pre-writing activity helps the child to learn what he/she is been taught in the school.

What are Those Pre-Writing Activities?

The pre-writing activity is a fundamental skill that the children need to develop before they are able to write. This skill helps to increase the child’s ability to hold and use a pencil, and also increase the ability to draw, write, copy and color.

There are the various kinds of Pre-Writing Activities; few among them are listed below:

1. Holding a Pencil: This is a most important skill that a child should learn before writing or drawing. There are the 3 ways of “Fine-Motor skills” that will teach to hold the pencil:

• Use shorter pencils: A shorter pencil means less space for cramming in unnecessary fingers. It basically forces kids to pinch thumb and index fingers. That’s why the ‘handwriting without tears curriculum’ makes children to use their own brand of short pencils.
• Teach them the “Pinch and Flip”: If your child is unable to write with shorter pencil perfectly then just teach them the ‘pinch and flip’. You just make them to pinch the sharp end of pencil and then to flip it around, until it gently rests in the ‘web-space’ (the soft skin between thumb and index finger) ready position.
• Let them hide something inside their last two fingers: If the above two methods doesn’t work then try to hide something under pinkie and ring fingers of your child. These two fingers are supposed to bend towards the palm while the other thumb, index and middle fingers do all the work. Well, in this this way the kid may have a hard time because they cannot separate the two sides of their hand (the pinkie side and the thumb side).
  It doesn’t matter what they hide under their last two fingers, and as long as they feel better and can comfortably do the work without their fingers bulging out from their hand. If possible parent can try other things also such as a small ball of play-dough, cotton ball, marble, crumpled piece of tissue paper, or a tiny rubber toy.

During these activities the child should have strong muscle in their hands, shoulders, and even in their core muscles to be able to sit up and write with better control.

2. Name Tracing: Learning the names by ourselves is the spring-board for literacy learning in pre-school. A most important word for a child is their name. At the first stage of name tracing, the child should be able to recognize their name, by then they should be able to understand to know how the shape and size of letters of their name is. Apart from this, parent must create fun by doing some other activity by which the child could very easily learn tracing the name. Well as we are discussing about the name tracing, let me help you to organize this activity.
For this you just need ‘paper, highlighter, marker or a pencil’. Now after this you just have to write your child’s name on a paper with either marker or pencil. In this way you just remember that the first letter of the word should be in capital letter and other in small letters. And now let your child trace over the name with the appropriate highlighter. Now after doing this activity regularly the child will steadily start to understand the letters and how to write his/her own name.

3. Cutting Practice: Using this cutting practice activity, child can understand things easily. Now to do this activity you have to give a pair of child friendly scissors, pictures and magazines to your child, then you have to make your child to work on fine motor and pre-writing skills by just inviting them to cut-out those pictures of their interest from the old magazines. By this they will start cutting their own chosen pictures like: toys, people & food. Apart from that they may also cut the letters or numbers that they would have recognized earlier.
But to do all this, they require perfect hand strength and more advanced fine motor skills.

4. Play Dough letters: Play dough is one of the interesting activities in pre-writing skill, in which they must roll the medium sized balls of play dough into a 6-inch rope. After that you should ask child to choose the letters of their choice and then let them play with dough to make those letters and to do so.

5. Dot to Dot:The dot to dot activity is also a very interesting activity for child to learn the pre-writing skill. This activity is mostly used in the pre-schools. Here we write child’s name on a paper using marker in the dot format instead of lines and then we will ask the child to start connecting those dots. You will realize that the child will start recognizing his/her name. This dot to dot activity can be repeated to learn other names of fruits, family members, toys and etc.

So before taking an admission in school, help your child to learn above mentioned pre-writing skills.